Tag: lecturer

In June I represented Utrecht University in a debate on game education. It wasn’t so much as a debate but more of a discussion, and in my case mainly giving a long overdue introduction to the game education at the Utrecht University.

It turns out there is quite a lot of confusion about the difference between university level students and applied higher education students. I was surprised by the gap: the audience didn’t seem to know much about the university, while in my background at the university I have never seen an explanation what makes the university different from applied higher education. It was very challenging to bridge this gap in one evening, and I think I succeeded only partially.

Another major source of confusion lies in the role of university internships. Where higher level education internships are usually about the intern joining the regular working process, university level internships are about doing research. Research seems to be interpreted as doing fundamental theoretical research which is only usable in companies working on state of the art technology. Understandably, this interpretation scares away a lot of companies from university level internships. In reality, university internships are often about applied research. If a game studio has a technical problem or question, this is usually sufficient for a university level internship. Most game studios have yet to recognize these technical problems and questions as university internship opportunities.

As of January 2014, I started as half-time lecturer at Utrecht University within the Virtual Worlds division of the Department of Information and Computing Sciences. The other half of my time I’m an experimental game developer. One of the reasons I was asked for this position was the good evaluation of the Advanced Graphics course which I created and taught in 2013.

The first major project I did as lecturer was recreating and lecturing the Game Design course from January to May. The course is primarily for Game Technology bachelor students and it is the only game design course in their technology-oriented curriculum. By recreating the entire course I was able to give it a more academic theoretical basis and include recent developments in game design theory. The new course largely reflects my current view on game design. You can visit the Game Design course website here, which contains all course material.

What I particularly like about my position as lecturer is the positive influence it has on my activities as experimental game developer. This positive influence also works the other way around as my lecturer role benefits greatly from my experimental game developer adventures.